 Alright, good afternoon everyone. My pleasure to welcome you to our annual lunch with the composers. It's an opportunity for you to ask questions of them and get to know them a little bit better. But maybe we'll start just by everyone introducing yourself. I don't know, say something important about composing. How's that? No pressure. Sounds good. We'll start with Gabrielle. My name is Gabriella Smith. Something important. I don't know to me what would be important about composing is when you first knew you needed to be a composer. How's that? I think when I was eight years old and trying to write music that I liked and failing and it made me want to try over and over and over again until this day and going on. And where are you from? I'm from San Francisco Bay Area. I grew up there. I'm currently a student at Princeton University. Hi, I'm TJ Cole. I'm originally from Atlanta although I'm living in Philadelphia right now. Important about composing. Well, when I was little I started taking piano lessons when I was maybe four or five. And I started tinkering on the piano when I was about six or seven. And it just became a really personal way of expression and I've just always wanted to continue doing it. Dylan? Hi, I'm Dylan. When I was six or so I had about four CDs, four or five CDs. And I thought that was what music was. But I had some ideas for things that might have gone into the genre of music that weren't on those four CDs. Hi, I'm Jennifer. And from an early age I was always doing creative stuff because my dad was an artist, but a visual artist. So I spent my childhood making eight millimeter films, claymation and writing short stories. But when I was a teenager I picked up a flute and taught myself to play. And it's somewhere, a couple of years after I started playing flute I found it fascinating to arrange notes on a page. And boy, it took over my life in a major way but I'm so glad it did. Hi, my name's Mark. I'm quite amused what Dylan said because when I was a kid this will date me now is that we didn't have CDs. It was record, it's vinyl. And I had a lot of classical things. I think I started composing from being bored at practicing the piano. I used to perform for my parents that I was actually playing the pieces that I had been given and I just distorted because I hated practicing. So it came out of that really strange way. Hi, my name is Andrew. I have a very similar story to Mark actually. And then I was taking piano lessons and did not enjoy practicing. And my parents were not musical and couldn't tell the difference. But I loved making stuff up. And actually I wanted to be an architect forever and ever and ever. And it wasn't until much later in sort of high school early college that I really decided to be a composer. Hi, I'm Jonathan Sheffer. I live in New York. That's an interesting question. I think it started with puppet shows in the basement somehow and then Broadway musicals. And I took a theory class in high school and I had to write a string quartet. And that's when I kind of realized how interesting it was to make notation and hear someone play it. And that was for me like a really transforming moment. Well, this is really an opportunity for you guys to ask questions. So I'll turn it over to all of you if I can. It's a little hard to see anyone, but yes, go ahead. We have a microphone coming around. It's for Dylan. And in the notes to your piece that was played last night, you say that there is a theme of 52 notes. Now, considering the fact that you're interested in mathematics, and I was just wondering what the significance of the 52 was. You can count the notes in any themes, but that's what you say. And what is the significance of the number 52 to you? Yeah, I can't say there was any real significance to the number 52, except that it was the right number of notes for the melody, unfortunately. Yeah, I just counted them up, put it in the program notes. Do you play cards? Aren't there 52 cards? Yeah, maybe that's what it is. Did everyone hear Dylan's piece last night? It was awesome. Great piece. Thanks. And I want to say we had a lot of comments, you know, because I think... I like the other piece you did for us that John Adams sponsored a couple of years ago. But everyone in the orchestra said that this was the show that a lot of... I don't know, I always hate it when people say, oh, you've grown so much. It kind of implies that you were not grown before. But I think the development of writing for orchestra is really, to me, quite clear. Because the last piece you wrote was very, very challenging to put together. You know, and maybe not necessarily in a good way. Do you know what I mean? Like it required so much effort. And this one just came together, you know. It seemed to really lie well for the instrument. So a lot of musicians were saying that too. That's a good thing. Yeah, and I think it is a good thing. Yes, next question. I saw someone somewhere. Here, yes. What kind of disciplines or practices are different for writing for opera than this piece that you wrote? Well, disciplines. That's interesting. I find it very hard to write opera. And partly because I find it hard to write for the voice. So, orchestral music comes much more easily to me. I don't think composers should find things easy. But I think that there's a stamina you need for an opera. And also operas, most of operas are over an hour and a half. So it was very different. It was quite a slog. I worked very closely with the librettist on my last opera, Anna Nicole. So, again, it's a much more collaborative effort. So there's a lot of things about it that are quite unique. And it's partly why I haven't written many operas. Because I need a good, well, I need two or three years to write it. But also I need gaps. I couldn't write another one straight after the last one. So it's a very different animal. But I love doing it. But it is strange. I'm trying to think of the difference between orchestral. All the pieces, all the operas I've written, the orchestral part is very important. So that's another thing that I love. Because I love writing for the orchestra so much. But it feels like a different phase of my life when I'm writing them. It's interesting because we've done a lot of vocal works, though, together. I mean, you've written a lot for voice and orchestra. Or small ensemble. We've recorded a lot of things. I have. It's weird. It's when singers seem to like me, but I've... Well, I don't know about audiences. But you don't like them. I'm going to say I didn't like them. But I don't find it easy. Yeah, they're hard work. Well, no, not them. They're writing vocal lines. Both. You're working on an opera now, right? You know, I just finished an opera and I was shocked at how different it was from writing instrumental music. And it was a 28-month... Slog is a good word because I had no idea how much room that would take in my head. Those characters stayed in my head. And I was working seven days a week all day, about seven to nine hours a day. 28 months straight, it was completely exhausting. And I finished it a month ago. And another opera company came up to me and said, you want to write an opera? And I'm thinking, there's no way. I need another decade. I've got to rest up. But it is totally different. I was so surprised at how different it was. And the funny thing is, the thing that shocked me was how much the characters lived in my head. When I got to the end of the opera, when I put the double bar on in my head, I could see the last character go out of the room and close the door. And it became completely silent. For the first time in over two years, it became completely silent in my head. And I was lost, confused and celebratory and exhausted. It was like nothing I've ever experienced. I'm going to have to rev it back up, though, and take a lot of vitamins to write another one, I think. Other questions? Yes? Microphone's coming. You would sit in the middle of the row, huh? This is a question for Andrew. I really enjoyed your piece last night and went to a number of the rehearsals and sort of saw the progression as the orchestra was sort of whipped into shape, I think. And one thing I wanted to say just as a comment was it was really helpful for me to understand what you were doing when you would describe the use of triggers. And my question is, are triggers or do you use triggers in other ways than you did in that piece? In other words, are other instruments other than percussion used as triggers and or do any of the other composers use triggers as a mechanism? Well, first of all, thank you. Yeah, I think a lot of composers use this idea of the trigger. It's actually, we use it in a very abstract way in orchestration all the time where often to signal an entrance of an instrument, some other instrument will just give us a little ping or something. I remember being taught that in sort of an orchestration class. It's a good thing to do. I have no idea if other composers sort of work out the elaborate system of meanings that I had in my head to as to which triggers meant what and which instruments triggered which activities. I mean, that felt to me like a very personal thing in that piece. Also, it's something that I wouldn't expect anyone to hear. It was more in a way like a tool for me to work with my own ideas. And for me that also, it comes out of my experience working with digital media and stuff like that. Like when we're watching a YouTube video and we fast forward or we rewind or we pause or these are all activities that are so common to us in the way we perceive all sorts of visual and auditory things. And I wanted to sort of portray the process of how that, working with data works on like a computer screen, but do it with the orchestra and in notation. So, I don't know, does anyone else here work with triggers? I've used triggers before. They're not built in with such an elaborate plan. So literal. Yeah, so literal. Yeah, that's it. They weren't determining factor and I used them as an orchestration technique. Yeah. Oh, sure. So I don't know if you were... You didn't hear his piece last night, but this is, I mean, I think there are two things. One is just talking about the piece last night. There were literal triggers in the percussion that controlled what happened in the rest of the orchestra. You know, when a percussionist hit a wood block, that meant a certain thing or the guiro, that meant stop, that meant pause, that meant play faster. So it was that kind of thing. But then I think the question is really about more, not literal triggers necessarily, but ways to structure your composition based on certain effects. I don't know. I'm thinking about, I mean, he's not here, but Chris Rouse, who always talks about when I've visited with him when he's writing a piece, he always has an elaborate system almost, and it's like trying to limit himself, you know, because I can imagine sitting down and thinking, oh my God, you know, I can write anything. So what he does, and I don't know if any of you guys do it, is he tries to limit himself either with a mathematical formula or with a certain number of notes that he doesn't. There was one piece, I mean, we did it here called Iscariot, you know, Judas, and he, of course, I never would have known any of this for so many reasons, but it was based on all the letters from all the women that dumped him in his life. You know, it was hysterical to me though, you know what I mean? So that was his own internal structuring, and as Andrew said, he's not hysterical, and there was one, like, there were a lot, I was really surprised. No, but the best was that one, and oh my God, he'll probably kill me for telling you all this, but then there was one woman, I think, O'Connor or O'Donnell, and she had an apostrophe, and that was the slapstick. Every time the slapstick, that was the apostrophe. You know, but it was this very elaborate, you know, method of containing himself and challenging himself, so I don't know if that applies to anybody. Absolutely, I do think that one of the main challenges of being a composer now, as you said, is you can write anything, and it's about shaping and forming your own universe, so to speak, and for me, all those percussion triggers were a way of shaping. Here are the rules of my musical universe, and how can I play within that? I think there's some sort of metaphor there, like old classical composers, they had a sort of system in which they were working. They had a formal system, like this is a sonata form, this is how a symphony goes, it does these things, and they had a tonal system. This is how we move from one chord to another, and I think that for me, the world that I set up for that piece is like me trying to create my own system and then work within it or break out of it, and I think for me as a listener with contemporary music, I'm always trying to figure out what is the world this composer is setting up and what are the parameters of that world and how do they work within their own language, and it's incredibly complicated to listen to contemporary music because there is no common world from composer to composer, but that's a unique challenge for us as listeners is to sort of try to put ourselves and figure out what are the rules of that universe. Yeah, I can jump in here also. This is really interesting to me how to limit yourself because the possibilities are limitless. My approach has always been, I studied with John Corleano, who is well known to everyone on this panel and maybe to a lot of you, but he, I just couldn't help it, I lifted one of his main tools of composition, which is he always writes from a 12-tone scale. The music may sound very tonal, but the tones are, in fact, everything is derived from the 12-tone scale, and when I first realized that about his music, I thought how could something so atonal, quote unquote, come out being so lyrical, and the fact is that he would stick rigorously to those melodies and those harmonies, but his ear kept drawing him to things that were really beautiful. And just on that note, I've always been sort of amazed and sort of stupefied by 12-tone music and found it extremely difficult, and I've conducted Schoenberg, and it always seemed to me that how could one hear so many levels of so many atonal counterpoint lines going. And I had an experience at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Berlin. They had a lot of artifacts, and one of the artifacts was a little file box from Arnold Schoenberg, and it was like a recipe that your mother had in the kitchen, and it had little tone rows written on it, and I thought, thank God, you know, I finally understood that he wrote those down too and had to keep checking the cards to make sure that he was adhering to this, this changed my life, literally. Once I realized that something so complex to me could be so easily understood, it really, it made it okay for me. And my piece that we're doing, which I wrote for children, is all based on 12-tone melodies, and then melodies come back, and they come back, and hopefully by the end they seem somewhat familiar. So this idea of limiting is everything for me. Another question? Yes. This question is for Dylan. I'm just wondering if you're a hiker or a climber, or how you got interested in a way of a Mallory's attempt for Everest. Did everyone hear the question? One of Dylan's inspirations was the climbing of Mount Everest in the 1920s, so the question was, is he a hiker? Well, I'm from California, so I certainly grew up with lots of beautiful places to go outside, and I like hiking a lot. I would not say that I'm a mountain climber, although I would love to be up there at the top for a short period of time. I don't think I would have the stamina to get there, but I'm very interested in people who are able to push themselves to do things that other people can't in general, and I think that's where the main interest comes from me. I saw a documentary about Mallory, which is how I learned about him for the first time. Now I can't remember what it was called, but it's good. Yes, in the back. Oh, she's coming. Hang on. Oh, sorry. Actually, this is a segue to Marin's question, one question ago. I'd be interested in how you use technology in translating what's in your head and maybe on the keyboard into a score, and also whether you set limits for yourself and what you will allow yourself to use technology to get you from one point to the other versus relying on something that's closer to the pre-computer program age. When I came up through graduate school, we didn't have the computers yet. They started appearing halfway through my graduate school years and the notation programs were awful. Like all of the measures would be crammed on one side of the page. You couldn't read anything. So I trained doing everything by hand. In fact, we used to have classes where you had to have ink. You had to copy out music and ink so that you would learn proper notation. Part of the way through, I think my doctorate, I got a computer and had a very slow notation program. I think now most composers use, almost all of them, use some sort of a program, either finale or sablea, so the two predominant notation programs. And some people will use other programs to help them play through things. But for me, I often do a lot of sketching. I always start writing by hand and at some point the ideas start coming fast enough. I put it into the computer. I don't really limit my use of it. The trick is to just try to write the best music you can, whether you're doing it with a pencil, a pen, or a computer. And none of those are guaranteed of the piece being good. It's kind of amazing how many pieces I see from young composers. You can tell it was all written on computer. It's a cut and paste warning sign I call it. It's like a red flag. You're like, oh, use more imagination. There's no guarantee that the ideas are going to be good. Over the years I've actually done a lot of things on computer, actually quite a bit. The one thing that I love about it is I can travel somewhere and carry everything I've ever written on the computer in case the bassoonist loses their part. And I need to print it up quickly. I have a lot of bassoonist losing parts. I'm not sure what that is. So there is a convenience factor, and it's actually much easier on your eyes and your back and your hands being able to extract parts. When I used to have to copy parts out by hand, I mean, it was unbelievable. I don't think these young people even know what that was like, though. I mean, really, and I remember, though, even just from my swing band trying to do charts and really I would copy music and do arrangements. And it was so time consuming. I mean, you can't imagine just trying to write out 14 parts. And also the expense involved, you know, it was hard enough to commission a piece, fund money to commission. But then it cost as much, if not more, to get the parts copied out. And, you know, it's funny because today it's almost hard as an orchestral musician to read a handwritten score. You know, we're so unaccustomed to it. We now are used to looking. I had trouble transitioning from handwritten scores to the computer scores because I knew so many of my favorite composers' handwriting. You know, I liked John Corleana's handwriting because I knew it. But now I'm used to the computer and now it's really hard to read a manuscript score. Well, John's scores were actually copied by his publisher. So they were very, very neat. Well, they were very tidy, but I just assumed it was because he is how he is. I wanted to... We have a certain age of Jennifer's age. Pardon me. That's quite all right. I like aging because it means I'm still here. Yeah, all right. All right. You know, I also came through the pencil. I also sketched, but I had a kind of breakthrough on this piece, actually, which I use a program called Performer, which is a very good program if you're a movie composer, as I have been, because it's very good for syncing and it's very good for a lot of things. And so it has a part where you can play and you can see lines of score as you play, as many programs have. And I was very limited because I could only see about six lines and then I would have to scroll down to sort of write a full orchestra score. One day I was looking at my second screen and I said, I wonder if I turn it this way if I can see the entire score. And I did that on this project for the first time. And I was able to see 30 lines of score and it was, for me, like the sun coming out after years of clouds. It was just amazing and I was just like so excited. I was able to really write and see everything all the time and that never happened to me with technology. You're doing something to say. To me the issue is with intentionality. It's not necessarily whether you're writing by hand or writing by computer and what Jennifer said it's totally true you do see scores where it's very clear that it's someone who opened up the computer program and it's in default 4.4 and you go to the next page and then you just kind of write the music and try and figure out how it can fit into the template that's given to you by whatever program you're using. But I think the important thing to do whether you're writing by hand or however you're composing is to make sure that you're writing exactly what you want to be writing and that's where technology can be helpful or it can be harmful just like anything else. It really all comes down to not trying to take the easy way out for composing. Just make sure. The only thing you can do as a composer is try and express what you are as best you possibly can and so that level of introspection and intentionality I think is really the most important thing when it comes to notation. I couldn't actually say it better than that. That was really good. I've noticed as people in my generation basically all use the computer in one way or another to write music that actually a lot of the beauty of engraving has kind of been lost a little bit and engraving is a fascinating subject even from a historical perspective of how music and engraving came to be and what are the standards of it. It was almost like a guild in the... Maybe explain it a little bit. So engraving is just the act of writing music down and it started hundreds and hundreds of years ago in Europe about the time of publishing words, they started publishing music and there's a whole science to it of how you space notes and musicians over the hundreds of years have gotten used to these very specific spacings of notes and we can tell what is beautiful in engraving and what is not. It's a little bit like a graphic design in that way and it makes all the difference especially to these players in the orchestra because they're just scanning music all the time and they need it to be beautifully engraved. So what's fascinating to me is that we've lost a little bit of that sense of it as an art form and as Dylan was saying there are sometimes in the computer software there are templates that open up and we just spill our thoughts into them and there are things that are actually much more difficult to do than they used to be when we were pencil and paper on hand for instance whenever I get some wacky idea in my head that I don't want bar lines in my music that I want I want a free open page and I want people to play however they want this used to be really easy because there were no bar lines on a piece of blank paper but in the computer it's actually really hard to take bar lines out and that's it's just one small example of how the computer sort of frame of what music notation is then impacts and affects us and how we think. You have to control the notation program you can't let the notation program dictate anything about the music that's the difference. The scores need to be bigger. As we get older every conductor you know is under 40 it's very hard really it's very very frustrating as a conductor to get all these new pieces and the size of the page might be big but the note heads are really really tiny and it's very very challenging to see and for the musicians too if the age range is going to be from 20 to 60 in the orchestra I think you have to really think about that because it's very very frustrating for musicians and for conductors you know I always have to you know these days enlarge or do this or do that and you know nothing ever fits in the right printer and there are all these issues. Yeah I would just say that it is there's a kind of imaginative pie in the sky aspect to what I do trying to imagine something wacky but then there's this incredibly practical thing of how much information can I put on a page before it's overload and before and so I feel like my existence is in these two very different realms one in which you know for the music orchestra librarian association which determines the size of these things there's a one millimeter size differential between when a staff is too small and when it's too big so and that is the size staff that these players will read and if it's too big they'll think it looks like child music and if it's too small they say that's the level of specificity we're dealing with and I struggle with this all the time because I want to write big complicated music and I have to spend a lot of time thinking how do I actually get this on a page so that someone can read it and I will say I did give Marin a score that was too small and she had to use a magnifying glass My glasses and my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass it was a highly entertaining study process I mean once I've studied it I'm okay but just figuring it out and for the musicians too if they have to read a lot of words it makes it complicated your music usually I can see maybe it's less notes maybe it's less notes maybe I don't know it's interesting and some more questions now gosh can you see anywhere it seems like a lot of hands are over here some whoever wants to there we go we'll get everybody in this question is for Marin I've been over the years I've been so impressed with how many new pieces you have to address yourself to unlike your distinguished colleague MTT who just says oh I'm going to play Mahler again you're playing new pieces all the time I'd say that too though don't but is there a difference between preparing a piece and actually conducting it in terms of difficulty and in your recollection how difficult was Andrew's piece in conducting or preparing because I was very impressed with all the stuff you had to do there well it's really hard to say to answer that in you know there's a difference always in the preparation and the actual conducting of any piece whether it's a Beethoven's or a contemporary piece I find contemporary music in some ways easier to be honest I find the more complicated meters for me are easier I find it much more challenging to conduct a Mozart symphony just that's me personally you know because you have to I have to go back and pretend that it's new music you know and try to create an atmosphere that seems fresh feels fresh and you know not approach it from well music but because it's not at all so for me actually the contemporary music is it's a refuge in a way and even though it seems very complicated it's quite relaxing for me there's something definitely wrong with me but I think Andrew's piece was I found yesterday's last night's concert challenging because well Andrew's piece and also T.J.'s piece that we're doing tonight they're very fast you know I find that there's a point where to sustain a certain tempo is very very difficult when you're conducting the small meter because it's physically hard to do 152 is very very fast and so I was trying to keep that tempo and so I find that's challenging the faster music in that way because you have to be present and then there's a point where you have to then go into bigger beats which means you have less control over it but that wouldn't be possible in Andrew's piece so it's that kind of rigorous physicality of it but in terms of I'm glad it looked really impressive I have to say in terms of actual conducting literal conducting it isn't that hard it's much harder for the players I think the pieces that are hard and sometimes you know frustratingly so are pieces that are where the composer hasn't really thought about how the divisions are going to affect the musicians and the conductor if you have a piece that really this is probably way too long an answer but if you have a piece that goes from 1116 to 1316 to 1716 you know and the inner pulse is so fast that you can't subdivide it meaning you can't hear the little parts of it but you have to practice all the time 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 so you have to be constantly working on that I've done a few pieces like that that have been super, super challenging and I always think the composers need to rethink that just so that the players and the conductor can manage things but I worked really hard on Andrew's piece and then the musicians clearly did too. They came entirely prepared. The first read through really was almost there didn't you think? It was stunning I mean I've never had an experience like this so thank you so much. Oh no it was a pleasure but this orchestra is unique in that. I can't express this to you enough. I don't know how many collective hours they put in before they arrive here. I mean we're talking thousands, thousands of work hours before they come to this festival so that they are completely prepared because they are thrilled and what happens of course it's like a great team because they start everybody's pushing the bar higher every time so you don't want to be left in the outfield or wherever it is so everybody comes even more prepared and more prepared. Could we get the music sooner? And we have the challenge shockingly unlike I think any other orchestra in the world that we can't get our hands on the music soon enough because there are all these rules this is something behind the scenes you don't even know the publishers won't let us have the music until a certain number of weeks before the performance because it's part of the rental of the parts. You can't imagine I can't imagine someone saying could we please get the music you know three months earlier because we want to practice it and they say no but that's what we have that's the situation we have do you believe it? We get it earlier than most orchestras because you know we've lobbied the publishers but this is a you know can you imagine I can't imagine orchestras saying you know we really want more time to practice so anyway and next question so many yes okay we'll come over there in a minute right there and then I'm interested in the career of a composer for you that have more or less established careers what did you do that you think really helped in your preparation for where you are now and those of you that are just starting out do you have any way that you look ahead and think I'm going this way or that way? Really hard question That's a good question I don't know if there's an answer because everyone does it differently but I have to admit I've always approached composing the trick I think is just to write a ton of music but always write to the best of your ability I often think is this the last piece I'm going to get the right I'm just going to pour everything into it so I hold that up as the standard when I'm composing a piece this may be the last piece I ever get the right so what am I going to put into it but I also try to take a lot of care in writing it I'm not willing to slap something together because it doesn't help anybody but I think everyone's career trajectory is probably extraordinarily different there's probably one of us has walked the same path throughout history I have degrees I've got too many degrees I have four degrees, the PhD is the top one So I haven't got anything That's the perfect example I wasn't even qualified to do a I teach now He doesn't even read In a way I've got quite a few ordinary things but I feel like a bit of a fake in that way but I think it's just I used to be very amused by my parents because they were always very impressive people with letters behind their name and of course it's funny that as a composer in a way I've got the grounding but I've never I haven't got degrees in that sense I'm not just right the career thing is like you do think about that and it's music and it's just I love doing it and I would do it if I had to stop or if something happened to my career it really went downhill and I had to get a proper job I would still do it in the evenings a bit like Charles but you know some people say that but it's true that it's just a passion and I always think that certainly seeing younger composers and sometimes students they would read when people ask me what I do and the idea of dreaming things up in your head is a bit mad very suspect so I always think I don't know lots of people do think about their career and of course it's great to have orchestras and things and commissions but it shouldn't be about that it should just be about you don't think about the trajectory I don't think about what I'm going to be doing I don't want to be 25 again I really don't let's ask the young composer I mean I think that's I can't imagine anyone says oh you know I want a really big career I think I'll be a composer you know I can't see that that's how it works I think it's something you know it's like you have this passion and you can't resist it and your parents try to break it and nothing happens right I think that's exactly right it's kind of nobody goes into being a composer of new classical music for the money in some ways it's like we made a decision at some point to not have a career that's there was the direction that we could have gone where we could have been trying to do something where we would make money consistently and that we chose not to do that and there are some people who can make money as a composer but I think in general the thoughts about our career you know getting commissions having incredible works just like the career festival player music is not about certainly not about money and it's not about exposure or any of those things it's about the idea that you know 12 months from now the ideas that you're having right now are going to be heard by a couple thousand people and all those people will get to feel whatever you want them to feel for those 15 minutes and that's the only reason that you do it and that's the only reason that you want to have the commissions and you want to have that next piece because you want someone to be there to play it and to hear it so I think that's all I think about as far as career goes I agree with Dylan I couldn't have said it better but I never think about career I want to write music and I'm obsessed with trying to do a better job than I did in the last piece and that's just been an obsession even if I went into a completely different field I would probably still be writing music to you know be better than my last piece and try to get closer to putting on the page what I hear in my head I agree with both Gabriella and Dylan in a way it sort of feels like a lifelong art project that's never really going to end but you just you keep doing it because you love it so much and it's something you really feel passionate about but yeah I try not to think about career I just try to think about what I really want to be investing in music at that particular time that I'm writing and I think you know it's I think thinking about career is really I don't know I suppose one has to do it now in them but I think it's a complete waste of energy really I just I can't I think the time one waste thinking about career is time you could be spending studying or doing something really positive and productive I mean it's even worse for conductors if that's possible I think you know and so many conductors just you know they come last week we had all the young conductors you know and what career advice do you have for me you know as soon as someone asks me that I'm so not interested in them I don't know how to explain it I have no career advice make your own life I mean you know find your way and do what's right and I think surround yourself with people that will tell you the truth you know people that will will embrace you but also be honest with you and are authentic about what they do one of the things for me about going to the one thing I think I really regret is going to conservatory for music that when I left Yale and I went to Juilliard I think that was the worst decision of my life because it stopped being about music and started being about career at that moment and the people who I'm attached to who are the friends from my childhood are all the people who didn't go into music as a career but were undergraduates with me at Yale who love music and are passionate about it still so you know when young people ask me for advice I always say be the best rounded person you can be and be well read and surround yourself with people you know if T.J. didn't have Jennifer she wouldn't be here because Jennifer introduced me to her piece so this is very important to have that kind of and I know that my composers who are you know more nearing my age they mentor young composers and they try to encourage them and that's the responsibility that we have I think going back next question somebody I just promised over there who was it over there there you got two over there one and one two it's kind of difficult question to ask just one composer because as Andrew Norman said earlier so many contemporary composers vary so differently from each other but when you're writing a transition how do you decide what kind of a transition to write it's kind of an important question as a performer to ask because when I'm faced with a transition I like to know where the music is going and the direction it's going and I heard a lot of interesting transitions in Dylan's piece last night and just particularly how do you decide whether to write a very abrupt transition just moving to the next melody or whether it flows the answer sounds kind of silly but I feel like it depends on the effect that you're trying to get across those the two that you just described are both creating some sort of different feeling in what you're listening to so if you have a transition you know if you have something that's turning into something else over a gradual long period of time which I did have in my piece last night then there's some sense that the first thing is becoming the second thing but you could have a transition where it just stops and you go into the next thing and then you have the sense it gives you a sense of memory maybe more than the first if you have something turning into something else you're there's an act of becoming but if you have something that changes abruptly into something else then you have memory of the first thing so you have a lot of different choices just in terms of what you're trying to do are you a composer? oh you play trombone so do you approach transitions differently? especially when I'm doing solo work I like to be able to know why the transition is written in a particular way so I can work with the prior melody and then the other melody together, sort of tie them together in the way that the composer wanted so knowing why a composer writes a particular transition that's your responsibility as the performer I mean that's the hard thing is that you have to as a performer I think one has to figure out get into the skin of the composer and even if it's not the right reason you have to justify why they did something and I would talk to especially it's difficult when the composer's dead which most of the people are that we play so you have to try to get into the psychology of the composer and structurally where are they going, what are they doing what's happening I think some of the revelationary moments for me have been talking to living composers and saying well look as performers and not composers we obsess about it right why this, what's this often a composer will say I don't know I just wanted to go down there I just, I mean it seems so banal I don't know I was bored so I went usually I don't mean to minimize it but sometimes as performers you can make a huge deal out of something that really wasn't a big deal and then it distorts the piece too but that's our responsibility as performers I think talk to the living composer if they're alive but it's about motivating it so that it makes sense for you and then it makes sense well I feel like often as a composer I'm trying to think about leaving room for the performers to interpret the piece and it's funny because when I'm working with performers they're often asking me how I want it to be interpreted but music is meant for sharing and for playing off each other's ideas so yeah I'm often thinking about the performer interpreting a lot the thing that matters is just that it sounds good you have to decide that you're the performer just be convincing whatever the transition is just be convincing thanks about that convincing nature of the piece I wanted to ask especially TJ and Gabriella with pieces coming up on the schedule when you hear a premiere or you hear a new orchestra play your work how do you decide what to take with you to the next performance is there a statute of limitations sometimes the poets go back and change a verb are you allowed and what happens what happens with the life of that piece I usually revise a piece after the first performance and sometimes even after the first rehearsal if that's allowed and even if I can't officially go back and revise it after the first rehearsal there's always changes and I would be constantly working on a piece and changing it and improving it if I didn't you know have to at some point go on to the next one but I've never felt completely done with a piece but at some point you just have to decide it's a better use of my time to start over and see where the next piece will take me and what I can instead of improving the last one what can I learn from the last one to bring into the next one it's a very dangerous thing actually you can end up like Pierre Boulez who has got about 10 pieces and he revises them all the time I feel the same way actually I'd quite like to scrap a lot of my pieces with a publisher and also I think it's very interesting talking to other composers and I think a lot of composers share this it's partly to do with revision but also what composers people say what's your favourite piece of yours and it's never one piece it's always like one section quite often one idea or one particular section it's never a whole piece it would be very strange if you were happy with the whole piece I would be very suspicious of composers that they loved I mean you do get it I have heard I have met people over the years but they're not your friends they're not real I don't know I'm just very suspicious but I think it's very healthy you've got to determine when like TJ said when you learn from that piece and go on to the next by the way you could end up just having one or two pieces which may be great pieces but you don't expand since the computer and demos are so good now it's rarely a surprise to me when I hear the orchestra play I've heard the piece very close to what it will sound like the samples that we use are so good with the exception of solo violin and a solo saxophone neither of which will ever be able to be sampled because they're too I don't know all the other instruments sound good in solo those two will never sound good but there's really very little surprise as I sat here today hearing the orchestra play the piece for the first time it sounded exactly like the demo frankly it sounded better because it was warm and human and there were mistakes and it was beautiful you know the computer is rather cold and it doesn't you know give you that but so the fact is by the time I've listened to that demo 30 or 40 times there's very little that I think gee I better change that you know I've had plenty of time to do that ahead that didn't use to be the case it used to be I showed up and oh my god that sounds awful you know that was the time to start worrying I better take that out I got to change that because you really didn't know what things sounded like no matter how good an orchestrator you were I find that I find that I agree with that but also I think that the one of my most exciting things as a composer is when I first hear an orchestral piece that I've written and you hear the first bar if it does work and it's the most exciting thing in the world really what I do actually talking about technology about is that I don't use although I it's funny there's an old tradition actually with composers of having two piano versions of orchestral works and so I learned from a composer years ago and I turn all my sounds to piano so I so I don't have any orchestral sounds because I can't bear the sounds anyway that so my final version is actually a piano version so I'm still thrilled when I hear the orchestra it's a I also have only piano version I don't have any banks loaded up at all because you get the harmony and the structure to some extent they're talking about so you can their instruments they're sampled instruments or sort of synthesized sounds of the winds the oboe the clarinet this and that and they can create and often I ask for it if I can have a MIDI version because it's in the computer so they can just spit out a you know a computer generated audio so it's like a guide track for me I mean it sounds like it's it's it's sort of a cross between music and acupuncture really you know it's like it's a very it's a very non-human kind of thing but it's helpful as a guide for me well if you I mean when you are writing with the sounds you have a you can sculpt with the sounds you can create those sounds and then it isn't a disaster when you have short rehearsal time it's a little like knowing the sex of your child before it's born I mean it would be nice to have a little bit of knowledge about that before you walk in here and that's what I I write with a full palette because I want to know that if I'm doing tremolo and by the way these samples have every technique that a violinist plays everything behind the bridge on the bridge near the bridge tremolo everything harmonics the whole thing I need to hear those because I begin to create around those sounds but you also write for films so maybe that's you know so you have that you have to use that technology a lot more probably well it's true although a lot of the film stuff is the electronics are only things that are electronic and the orchestra is still given for all the warm sound that really creates the difference between a sort of tinny score and otherwise on the film note I would just say that you know a lot of things that are extended techniques that composers in the classical world really struggle with are very proud of are everyday things in the recording in studios in films every horror film every action film has used every instrument every technique and the players come in without all the preparation it's really remarkable to me that they're like two different worlds and they see glissando they know exactly you know silent glissando everything that you use so brilliantly in your piece and they just it just comes out and it's really amazing to me we live in such a different structure in terms of how we produce music in the concert world the schedules and the unions and the pressure that we're under to create new work in such a short time but it's true that the film stuff does benefit from a lot of this because so much music is being produced every day in Hollywood mostly the amount of recorded music it's just it's prodigious it just goes and goes and goes and every new movie score is just the parts just get thrown out nobody plays it again it's really remarkable but I just want you know there's so much love and care given here to contemporary music and that's the really extraordinary thing about this festival for me is that every person comes with their own set of ideas musically and all comers are given equal you know respect and time it's really a beautiful thing but did you want to say something Andrew? no I'm good thank you you're good no I'm good let's see oh yes go ahead wait she's coming I have a comment and a question about Matt's performance in particular how visually experienced was and I wondered how people listening on the radio would cope with Andrew Norman's piece for example where the range of sound was so extraordinary it sort of ties in with a common that Baylor made in the movie about the range of space from one side of the orchestra to the other and I was particularly aware of that in last night's concert and in a couple of pieces I've heard rehearsed where the piece begins with a drum and a tuba sort of bracketing the orchestra and reminding you how big it is and the question is do any of you take visual effects into account as you're composing or is it all about sound? Andrew Well my answer is yes absolutely I believe my work is for live performance this the piece that you heard last night I actually can't imagine listening to that on the radio because for me there's such a difference between sound that is disembodied where you aren't seeing someone make it with their body and with their instrument and music that is embodied where it is about the human form interacting with an instrument or whatever waving their arms or doing something physical to create sound and I'm very interested in what making sound looks like and to me there's a lot of there's huge expressive power in gestures which actually make no sound and there's no better example than that than Marin the conductor who is incredibly expressive as all conductors are and she is making no sound but we get so much from her gestures and that is something I think about a lot with string players because they have these very expressive arms and upper bodies that are moving and I like to think of the sort of choreographic potential there and that is something that is absolutely not part of recorded sound and there's plenty of music that works beautifully as recorded sound as it should there's a lot of music that is made to be exclusively recorded and listened to in that way and I think actually what we should be doing is thinking about what really makes the orchestral experience special and what that is is that there's 80 bodies up there doing something in front of us and if we can create work that where the sense of the body is special that means that people have to be in the hall to listen to it and I think that's for me what I think about quite a bit in my work so I'm glad that that at least came across that there's a certain spatial and visual and sort of body centric importance to the musical gestures yes composer that one tradition was it turned back on you and I was just wondering if the others anybody else had like one composer or one tradition that really had a huge impact on your music well when I was maybe 12 or 13 I was exposed to John Williams the film composer and at that age I thought I wanted to be a film composer before I was really exposed to classical or even contemporary classical music and I feel like that's really influenced the music that I'm writing now not so much in the piece that's being played tonight but lately I've really been drawn to melodic music and melody and so I guess that was because I was exposed to John Williams and he was the reason that I wanted to become a composer then Bob Dylan for me I I grew up pretty much only listening to classical music the four CDs it was like English string music and Holst and Peter Warlock and then in sixth grade everybody was listening to punk rock and I was kind of I was doing it too I guess I'm super into the clash I'd go to school and pretend to be and then I heard Bob Dylan realize that you could have that extreme emotional connection that I had to Holst with non classical music and that changed my life extremely for me it was the Beatles because I didn't grow up around classical music at all so my dad worked at home and there was always rock and roll so it was the Beatles well mine's strange because it was originally very classical when I was growing up but then I got the bulk of soul music and in fact I didn't really talk about the Beatles actually even though I come from England I'm not a fan of white rock music it's more of black soul music that I really love so it's funny because yesterday I watched this new film about James Brown which is on at the cinema which is fantastic actually the guy that plays James Brown it's a bit sentimental in places but just to know that he existed a very important part of my sort of late teens was James Brown I saw him live twice and all those sort of black musicians are very important and I think that although it might not come through in the music I think there's definitely this idea of sort of wearing your heart on your sleeve and also this emotional sort of power I hope is something that I get from and I find extraordinary in the cinema just being there wasn't that many people there but just the music is just so powerful yeah it's really visceral and it may be cry sometimes because although it's not actually melancholic music in fact the reverse but there's something so remarkable about this emotional power that it actually puts you in a chance in a way in a good way and so I suppose that although I came from very classical my parents stopped me listening to pop music which made it more interesting for me later on of course that's why I like certain things because James Brown seems and is but you know seemed very naughty that's a tough question for me but I actually I'm similar to TJ in that I listened to John Williams and when I was 14 and I played in youth orchestra so I is a combination of sort of Brahms and John Williams but there's something to me about I think I've always been turned on by the kind of epic narrative quality of both big film orchestral music and big symphonic music and how you can really tell these gigantic stories in that medium and I think that's something that I've carried through through maybe I should just say something out loud at this moment which is that I was speaking to John Williams recently and he wanted to be here so I feel like it's like a weird channeling why is any here well but clearly he is here so awesome anyway it's kind of freaky awesome gosh I mean I think like a lot of people on the panel when I was a kid I listened to Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Buffalo Springfield Grateful Dead and then I was playing in youth orchestras too and it's a funny soup when you put all those things together I love Broadway musicals I grew up outside of New York and was taken to the theater a lot so for me melody and song are really the basis of everything to me you know Gershwin American music to me so I feel part of that if I can be so bold but Benjamin Britten came along and just sort of knocked me on my ass that was a great revelation for me when I was in my 20s just kind of changed everything well like Dylan and Jonathan I was also very influenced by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and playing youth orchestras but I think maybe one of the earliest influences was and dancing a lot to Scottish and Irish fiddle music and I think the energy of my music is still very inspired by that not only the music itself but also the way it made me want to move You know the most amazing thing about this panel is that if you had the same panel in England would be totally different and I think this is I mean that in a positive way because I think because American and also because the fact is that the composers are talking about Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and I think that it's and it's when I work with American orchestras because they know that tradition and they know the jazz tradition it's easier it's easier because I sort of feel closer to the American tradition and I do to the British tradition or the English tradition so it's quite remarkable I've just been thinking if you had this in the UK people wouldn't be talking about other composers but certainly not think I mean some people are younger than generations but it is interesting that I think that's why I love being in America Well we love having you here Thank you all very much for being here Thanks to my panel, thank you